HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan Interview

June 30, 2010

[ Page 1 of 3 ]

By Bryant Rousseau

Shaun Donovan, the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and a Harvard-trained architect, recently attended the ground-breaking ceremony for Via Verde, a mixed-income apartment community in the South Bronx that he says exemplifies the Obama administration’s “fundamentally different” approach to housing—a move away from the Corbusian, tabula rasa model to one that supports local visions of site design. RECORD’s Bryant Rousseau spoke with Donovan, 44, about the stimulus package, his focus on planning, and the opportunity for architects to play a larger role in transforming communities.

Donovan discusses how important design is to HUD's affordable-housing mission, and he talks about HUD’s Marcel Breuer-designed headquarters.

Donovan discusses retrofitting and increasing awareness among average Americans about green buildings.

Rate this project:
Based on what you have seen and read about this project, how would you grade it? Use the stars below to indicate your assessment, five stars being the highest rating.

----- Advertising -----

Bryant Rousseau: When the debate about the economic stimulus package was raging, architects had high hopes that the Recovery Act would provide a significant boost to their work, especially with regards to designing schools. It's fair to say they were disappointed with where the money was eventually directed. Can you give me a statistical sense of the impact the $13.6 billion in stimulus funding allocated to HUD has had on the architecture profession?

Shaun Donovan: Obviously, architects are deeply involved in the design of multi-family housing. And without the Recovery Act, we would not have any multi-family construction going on—it would be stopped dead in its tracks, along with all the jobs and the design work that goes with it.

[Even] in good times, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program [which received billions of dollars in stimulus support] makes up half of all new multi-family construction. Today, when the market has slowed down so much, it's an even more critical piece of ensuring that multi-family design and construction continues at all.

So for any architect who works in multi-family development, the Recovery Act, and the billions it allocated to multifamily financing, has been absolutely critical. In terms of the overall job numbers, the more than 20,000 jobs that have already been created [as attributed to HUD’s stimulus spending], we don't have a specific breakdown of how many architects that accounts for. But for architects working in rental or multifamily housing, every one of those jobs is due to the Recovery Act.

BR: HUD’s Recovery Act dollars have financed the renovation of more than 150,000 units. But what about new construction?

SD: If you look at the tax credit investments we're making through the Recovery Act, those dollars alone will make up more than 120,000 units. Not all of those will be new construction, but a large share will be. So, hundreds of thousands of units will be continued and completed because of the Recovery Act.

BR: Moving away from the aggregate numbers, what about the anecdotal? Tell us about a specific project where HUD’s Recovery Act dollars are creating design jobs, improving the nation's housing stock, and facilitating urban development.

SD: I was recently in Baltimore to break ground on a project called City Arts [designed by Hord/Coplan/Macht]. It's a very interesting example of artist housing that will incorporate design and gallery space, supporting a broader revitalization in the community.

One of the things that I see consistently is Recovery Act projects creating ripple effects that move through a neighborhood, enabling other projects to move forward where a developer may have had real questions about the project’s viability. There is a confidence that emerges when you see construction continuing through a downturn. It helps send the message to surrounding properties and surrounding communities that we're moving forward, that there is hope.

BR: What are your top priorities for the next 12 months?

SD: Broadly speaking, our national housing policy has been too focused on home ownership and not enough on rental housing and creating sustainable communities. HUD was able to get funding for our new Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities. That will be a critical priority in our next budget, to continue funding that investment. The federal effort to support sustainable, smart planning, at both the local and the regional level, is a major priority for this administration—and architects and urban planners will play an incredibly important role in that effort.

One of the lessons we can take from the foreclosure crisis is not about financial products; it’s about the geography of our metropolitan areas. Look at the places hardest hit: the exurbs of Las Vegas and Phoenix or areas in California and Florida, where you have isolated developments, two-hour-long commutes to jobs, and a lack of transportation options. Those are the places that have lost the most value in this crisis. It’s a lesson about how we think about our communities, how we invest in them.

BR: How do you factor effective planning into allocation of HUD dollars?

SD: What the budget will accomplish beyond just an investment in more sustainable housing is an investment in planning itself—$140 million in the 2010 budget, $100 million of which is going to a competition for regional planning efforts; and $40 million, combined with about $35 million in Department of Transportation funds, will be put toward local planning efforts.

There's never been this scale of federal investment in supporting sophisticated planning efforts at the community or metropolitan level. That will drive the ability—particularly at a time when state and local budgets have been impacted so desperately—for communities to bring together central cities with suburban cities, to really begin to integrate their transportation efforts, their housing efforts. It's an investment in planning that we've never seen before at the federal level.

BR: Is that a difficult sell to make to Congress? It is a radically different focus for HUD.

To write a comment about this story, please sign in. If this is your first time commenting on this site, you will be required to fill out a brief registration form. Your public username will be the beginning of the email address that you enter into the form (everything before the @ symbol). Other than that, none of the information that you enter will be publically displayed.

We welcome comments from all points of view. Off-topic or abusive comments, however, will be removed at the editors’ discretion.